Cloud computing is an approach that can be used to allow customers to create and activate new services, as well as to update existing service capabilities on-demand and in near realtime. To accommodate requirements of on-demand service requests from customers, software defined networking (“SDN”) is used to allow network infrastructure as a network resource pool (network-on-demand) to adapt to user service demand through on-demand network resource allocation and reallocation via hardware programmability on virtualized network components. Thus, SDN can obviate the need for demand to be adapted to constraints of hardware-oriented network infrastructure.
One difficulty in network operations arises, however, in SDN networks. The operation of on-demand network resource allocation and/or reallocation requires knowledge of the network topology at the time needed. A network topology is a set of network resource components and their relationships supporting given applications. Because SDN can enable almost instantaneous changes to the virtual network configuration, however, one may have difficulty tracking and discovering the connectivity relationship between virtualized network functions (“VNFs”), virtual machines (“VMs”) and host hardware server at the time needed. As such, identifying available and utilized elements and/or information relating to the virtual network topology at a given time may be difficult, if not impossible.